Welcome to the blog for EvolveBackwards.com. This blog will document the beginning (and end?) of a startup T-shirt company. This is for the good of everyone, as it will describe what we did right and what we could have done better.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

I am a quarter way through Richard Nikoley's new book "Free the Animal: How to Loose Weight & Fat on the Paleo Diet." I have always been a huge fan of his blog and so far I love the book. Richard tells it like it is. He makes sensible connections to the modern world that are obvious once he points them out. It is a great book for anyone interested in the basics of the primal lifestyle or for any primal enthusiast. It is easy to read and understand; entertaining and cheap. Check it out on Amazon. I will post a more complete review once I finish the book.

Also, here is a great quote by the ancient Greek physician, Hippocrates, who lived from 460 to 377 BC:

"Let food be thy medicine & medicine be thy food"

I don't think this needs explanation. It's still true.

I think we need a little tagline for our site. I'm not sure "evolve backwards" says everything we need it to say. I have been thinking of a few different tag lines. For example:

Another week has gone by and we haven't made any real sales yet. Just some friends and family, which we are thankful for. That is all we can really expect because we have no traffic to our site besides the people we tell. Therefore, it is our goal to get more traffic! How do we do that?

I've been reading some books about internet marketing and putting some of those ideas to work. We recently registered our site on Google to aid the search engine in categorizing our site. Now, when you search the words "evolve backwards" our site comes up (on the second page... hey- it's a start).

We are writing T-shirt review websites in hopes that they can mention our shirts on their blog. Some of those big t-shirt sites get a lot of traffic that we can capitalize on.

We also started using Twitter, which Charlie is in charge of. None of us are familiar with Twitter but we are learning. Our name is Evlove.

We still love the idea of our shirts and do think they will sell enough to turn a profit. If there is anything that you think we are missing on our site that would help, please let us know by writing us at CustomerService@evolvebackwards.com

Monday, January 23, 2012

Upon receiving our first batches of T-shirts from our printing company we looked them over and thought they had come out terrific. Luckily, before we began selling, Charlie noticed that the name of the cave from which the Lions art came from was misspelled... Misspelled on 100+ shirts!

After contacting the printing company we found out how this mistake was made. As we worked with the designers, we emailed the text we wanted displayed on the back of each shirt. They returned a picture proof of what the shirt would look like when printed. We didn't zoom in to inspect the text on the shirts like we should have. We assumed it was spelled correctly using "copy - paste" and unfortunately we assumed wrong. To be fair, had we taken a closer look at the proof we would have found the error. Since it was both of our faults, the company offered to make us a deal on future orders.

Now, what do we do with half our T-shirt inventory ruined? We came up with a few ideas. We could:
1. sell them as they are without making mention of the spelling error
2. sell them at a discounted price after mentioning the spelling error
3. give them away
4. give up

Obviously option 1 is hardly an option as that is not good business and could only have negative results. Option 4 was no good either because we had already come so far. We gave option 2 some thought but decided not to because we thought of a better idea. We are giving them away with every order in hopes that it will encourage people to buy our shirts. A 2 for 1 deal is a great way to sell more merchandise. Sure, we are taking a loss, but, hopefully they sell quickly and we can re-order the correct design.

Monday, December 19, 2011

In order to keep things simple, we decided not to charge for shipping. To compensate for this, we did increase the price of the T-shirts. We feel this is a fair trade-off.

First of all, everyone likes to receive free shipping because everyone likes free! Secondly, there is a post office nearby to our business location. We can easily walk packages over to the post office, let them weigh them and ship them- easy.

We experimented to see how many T-shirts we could fit inside a white poly mailer bag. We discovered that three shirts would fit easily. More than three and we will have to ship inside a flat rate box. This is not that expensive as small and medium flat rate boxes ship for around five dollars and can hold around 15 shirts. If someone wants to buy more than 15 and we have to pay more for shipping, that is OK too because we are just glad to be selling that many shirts.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

As many people know, there are lots of sites online with which to create shirts. And we tried a few of them. Again, and again, and again. There was always something we disliked about each of them. And that problem is inherit with why we decided to create EvlovE in the first place, but that is for another time. It was so impersonal, we couldn’t meet any of the creators, artists, or even salesman from any of the websites. Fortunately, we had remembered seeing a local manufacturer in the months before. Driving by the company, we decided to hop in and see what they could do for us. It was amazing! We met the salesman, the artists, the receptionist etc. They could give us a better shirt, for a lower price, and with a smile. It was great. We had our shirts ready to go, and with great customer service to boot.

Last problem, our store. While our shirt designs were being finalized, we were undergoing the new (to us anyways) problems of getting a business license and starting an online store. With this came unique problems of being able successfully explain what we wanted to do with our business, and creating a friendly atmosphere for people to come, look around, maybe shop, but hopefully learn something about the Primal lifestyle.

Blog Archive

About Me

We are three young college graduates who currently work together, live together, and are now starting a T-shirt business together. We hope our T-shirts will appeal to a majority of people because of their simple theme and overall originality. Either way, we pledge to document our first business experiences.